A Few Bites Of The Apple

Cloned app scandals, Chinese app allegations, rumours about the iPad 3 – just another week of Apple bites that have been causing some “noise” in the media; we round up the top stories for you below.

Cloned Apps

In an unprecedented move, Apple recently removed over 50 cloned apps created by the same developer, from the App store.

Most of them were copycat games with names like “Angry Ninja Birds”, “Plant vs. Zombie” and “Temple Jump”; this has become more of a problem recently, with some of the cloned games enjoying some level of popularity….and it has slowly risen onto Apple’s radar until they decided to do something about it.

One developer has been very busy, quite clearly because all the cloned games were the work of Anton Sinelnikov, who had 57 of his 68 games on the App store removed!

He may be re-thinking his app-development strategy at this point.

Chinese App Problems?

Also on the app store recently there was more news of dodgy behavior – when Apple removed all of the apps from Chinese publisher Qihoo – because of suspected strange review activity.

Then what happened but 3 Chinese language free-to-play games featured in the US top grossing chart! It seems there is a problem with hacking iTunes accounts and using stolen credit cards to make in-game purchases, thereby bumping up an app’s ranking on the store.

A worrying trend!

Buzz About the iPad 3

There are a lot of rumours about just how sexy the iPad 3 is going to be for mobile gamers.

The main focus of attention appears to be the expected retina-resolution display, as was featured on the iPhone 4S….and this would presumably allow exceptional graphics-based games. The display could apparently feature four times the pixels of the current version.

Screen resolution is touted to be 2048 × 1536, compared to the 1024-by-768 of the iPad 2.

Apple is asking developers to send in screenshots of apps in higher resolution than previously, which stokes the flames of the speculation.

None of us mere mortals know when the release date will be, nor whether the price will remain steady, though it seems from the added “noise” that release could be on the way quite soon.

So another interesting couple of weeks at Apple behind us. Wonder what’s around the corner…